My point was purely contextual to what you & @Medievalist said ?? So I don’t follow, sorry.
Sorry, I just wasn’t sure if you were trying to imply something. The quote from my post made me think that you were possibly attempting to counter my argument that legalisation is unlikely to increase the death toll.
You were just mentioning the point that prescription drugs already create more overdose fatalities than illicit drug use, and that the prescription drug toll is rising? And highlighting the relative safety of cannabis?
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We cool, didn’t mean to sound argument-ized? (wtf is the word for that).
Just providing context re where we currently are -re going to: go up vs down vs no change.
All those those points are in the data 
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I live in Canada and we’re looking at national legalization in the next couple of years. If I was actually in a hurry I could go see some friends of mine and get as stoned as I liked right now.
Mostly I just want the “never tried pot while it was illegal but then did it once it was legal” achievement because I think it’s going to be a pretty rare one.
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I’ve oscillated between social use, zero use & pretty frequently (throughout life)- the latter being after I broke my back. To me it’s, at this point, it’s kinda like an all natural form of Vicodin. Only safer. Or beer, only better. And safer.
This is why I’m so grateful not to have to suffer chronic pain. If my medication choices were standardized cannabis extract or opioids, my already executive-challenged cognition would be totally screwed. My body (and especially my brain) hates cannabis and opioids bring my GI tract to a grinding halt. No f—king thanks.
This is exactly why clinical providers themselves have started exploring and encouraging research of non-pharmaceutical interventions for chronic pain.
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I wouldn’t think so. Cigarettes are legal, but here in Ontario, the government taxes the legal stuff and people go on reserves to buy them because if drugs are legal, the government will tax and regulate drugs to mind-numbing lengths. People will steal to get them or just find illegal sellers who don’t tax and provide it cheaper. People will create new drugs with different side effects that will become posh and edgy will threaten the old guard and the establishment drug manufacturers will lobby to make the new guys illegal.
Legalizing will not solve what many people hope it will. People who thrive through illegal cartels aren’t just going to become legitimate businessmen because we make drugs legal. There are people who like to function a certain way and if they can’t do it one way, they will set up a new rigged board to win with the same methods, but just replace something else for illegal drugs. Drugs may be a habit, but so is behaving in a certain way, good or bad.
Societies always seem to look at content of a problem, but never the structure of another’s thought. It’s like giving a schoolyard bully your lunch money and then expecting him to just leave you alone. His power doesn’t come from shaking you down for money – it comes from just making you bend to his will. The actual item is not what he wants per se; it is the act of capitulation that he seeks.
I think according to Interpol, art crimes (theft forgery, use as underground currency) is still the third largest global criminal activity, but we don’t pay attention to the one behind drug and arms smuggling and it tops cybercrime on many levels. As I said, people are about sticking to systems they think or know work for them and whether drugs are legalized or not, people are not going to change because of the legal status.
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I prefer the worst-case prediction, because I’d like a pleasant surprise. But you could certainly be right - in fact I hope you are! I personally think even the worst case supports total legalization, at least in the long run.
Well, keep in mind that’s a policy that is being pursued; it’s the inevitable and well-understood result of actions that are being taken willingly by our ruling classes.
Anti-abuse efforts that boil down to prescribing toxic formulations of drugs and removing access to less toxic alternatives is killing people. There are many clever rationalizations that mask this, and some of the people involved have the best of intentions, but it’s what’s happening in real life.
I can’t get safe legal codeine tabs like I could in the 70s; my choices now are prescription drugs with very narrow safety margins or illegal opiates like heroin. Yet I have a documented history of using codeine without addiction or any other ill effects; my serotonin/dopamine/melatonin issues were controlled… until politics intervened.
The neurologist has me taking seven pills now to try to get the same therapeutic effect as one codeine tab. Unfortunately it does not work 
so we’ll have to try something else, rather than using a safe and well understood and successful therapy.
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But art crime is driven by other crime. Art is exceptionally good for money laundering because it’s price isn’t at all related to the real world. You can buy a piece of art for $1M and “sell it for $6M” a few years later to launder $5M. But when you do that you also inflate the price of that piece of art and other art by that artist which means that art turns into a great currency because it’s a lot of money in relatively small/lightweight form. Since it’s worth a ton of money, that attracts theft and forgery. Art crime is very different than drugs and weapons and isn’t going to infect a poor neighborhood with violent gangs.
When you talk about addressing the form rather than the content, that is precisely the point of making drugs legal. Having drugs be illegal and punishing people for selling and using them is trying to push out unwanted content. Sure people will still use illegal means to get drugs, but if it becomes something like alcohol of cigarettes we’ll see drastically reduced illegal purchasing (cigarette smuggling is less than 5% of Canadian cigarette sales based on quick googling - $1.5B to over $30B total market) and considerably less violence (a lot of cigarette smuggling is just people who live near the border buying a few cartons when they are in the US, not organized crime).
There would be a period of unheaval, and current drug dealers would probably be hit very hard. But the current drug market needs criminalization to sustain itself. Why the hell would I go buy drugs from a guy with a gun and gang affiliations on the street corner when I could buy them from Shopper’s Drug Mart?
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Reminds me of one of those squirrely counter debates from forensics a la ‘you can’t do that because there are unknown consequences’ as if continuing forward in the current manner does not also have as many possible unexpected consequences and negative effects as change would. But then, I never bought the ‘devil you know’ argument either. I’m more likely to keep making changes until the outcome approximates my goals than to avoid change due to fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
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Have you met the 2-C family? They’re pretty fuckin’ fun.
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No. I’m not going to be in a situation where I get opportunity to try anything new for at least another 10 years. 
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Also: Useful for mind hacking.
That’s generally my use for drugs now. There a good number of legal nootropics but a lot of the best mind hacking tools are in the RC world or among the hallucinogenics.
It’s kind of sad that so many of those aren’t legal, because there’s a HUGE problem solving advantage to being able to approach the same problem from a multitude of mental states.
The concept of not quickly becoming the most useful person in any role I find myself in has become alien to me … largely I think because I treat my brain as a resource to be exploited rather than just flouncing about saying ‘Oh! Look at the pretty idea that fell out of my head…wherever did that come from?’
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But all crime can be argued to support other crime. Drugs can be equal currency to a stolen Chagall, for instance --and is.
People do not use illegal drugs for a single reason. Some people want to self-medicate because they are angry, depressed, etc. Others want to stick it to mom and dad as if they cared. There are a million reasons for taking drugs, but we can also use legal prescription drugs…but people don’t.
People also buy illegal cigarettes though there are no shortage legal ones.
Why?
It is the structure of their thinking that dictates that they want something outside the system – not in the system.
Drugs is the mere content and is all but irrelevant fodder for something else. Make crack legal and people will find a new content to fuel their structure because they driven to be contrarians, rebels, outsiders, irritants, whatever good or bad.
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I consider this a bit of a tangent to the discussion about legalizing drugs, but art is in a unique position compared to things like guns, drugs, washing detergent, baby formula and everything else that gets used as alternative currencies. It’s complete lack of objective intrinsic value makes it great for money laundering. In the end, if baby formula is being traded for some other good, it one days ends up with a baby or it expires and becomes valueless, so it’s value is capped by the value of feeding a baby. Art doesn’t work like that, you can make up any price for it you want. We can agree a piece of art is worth $1M and then I can pay you $20M for it and you can give me $19M of drugs or guns with that, but we have a 100% legal excuse for transferring the money. I can’t do that with Tide detergent because $1M of detergent is objectively not worth $20M. I can’t do that with cocaine because it doesn’t have the same flexible value and because you can’t launder money by selling illegal goods.
People do use drugs for all kinds of reasons, but that doesn’t just mean that different people use drugs for different reasons, it also means that an individual is using drugs for a number of different reasons and simultaneously has a number of different reasons why they might not choose to use drugs. In addition to self-medicating, showing up mom and dad, and just plain liking it, we have price, availability, risk of using, risk of purchasing, convenience of purchasing and tons of other factors. Most people minimize rather than maximize risks. Most people use intoxicants. If they have a less risky way to acquire the same thing at the same price they’ll usually choose it. If they have a less risky way to acquire the same thing at a higher price then they’ll weigh the risk vs. cost. People perceive dealing with street gangs as very, very risky and are willing to pay money to avoid doing so.
With legal drugs people have a lot more options. You are right that people still buy illegal cigarettes, but I am right that it is less than 5% of the market, that the black market is hugely less violent, and that it is much more disorganized. Illegal alcohol seems to be such a small problem I can hardly find any information on it. Most people get their hair cut by a barber or a hairdresser despite the fact that getting your hair cut by your friend or a family member is legal. Most people who lift weights do so in gyms despite being able to simply pick up heavy things in their homes. We live in a consumer culture, and the veneer of legitimacy over a consumer good is a huge draw.
I don’t really understand how your hypothesis works. You are saying that some substantial portion of drug users are not so much drug users as contrarians who are better described as being locked into a pattern of illegal behavour than they are describe as liking drugs. This motivation is so overwhelming that they would prefer to continue to interact with a potentially dangerous and violent system over interacting with a safe one. There are so many of these people that they would sustain a black market drug trade. Or alternatively they would switch to legal drugs but do something else that would cause just as much havok instead. Is that what you are saying?
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I think you’re way overthinking it, the why on cigarettes is really pretty simple- the taxes are through the fucking roof.
And in that market, what violence there is comes from the cops, not from turf wars. And with legalization, we have to be careful not to fuck it up by letting the gov’t get too greedy.
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Well, in Ontario, Canada, I can only assume the government will regulate and tax pot in a similar way to their regulation and tax on cigarettes and alcohol, both of which the government is pretty paternalistic about. But the big difference between having a legal market with a black market to avoid taxes and an illegal good is that the government approach is about figuring out how to maximize compliance rather than figuring out how to get the baddies. I’m pretty sure fines would be about a million times more effective for dealing with illegal drugs than criminal laws have been.
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Argumentative
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Hardly.
Sorry, I’m confused - it’s been one (it is being) one of those days.
TY
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Your welcome
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